According to TSSZ News 55% of respondents said that 2013 was a bad year for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, compared to 61% of respondents saying that 2012 was a good year for Sonic.

The good news about Sonic the Hedgehog (in my view) in 2013 was the smartphone and tablet game Sonic Dash, as well as the remastered versions of classic Sonic games, as well as Nintendo 3DS version of the original Sonic game of 1991 released in Japan to coincide with the 25th Anniversary of the Sega Mega Drive’s (Sega Genesis in North America) Japanese release. I also say that Sonic’s appearance in the new Super Smash Bros. game was OK, even though his design for that game looked ugly to me.

The bad news was the commercial flop of Sonic Lost World and Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. We have rarely wrote many posts on Sonic Lost World, but did write some of the latter (M&S2014). It seems that we probably wrote less posts on those games possibly because I knew that those new Sonic games looked boring. Also another bad news is the upcoming animated series Sonic Boom first teased by Dave Polsky at a My Little Pony fan convention in Columbus, Ohio and first announced by Sega of America on its blog on 7 October 2013. The show is due to premiere in Autumn/Fall 2014 on Cartoon Network in the US, and Canal J and Gulli in France. The show has been criticised by Sonic fans for its redesigns of Sonic and Knuckles.

Another bad news for me was the worldwide partnership between Nintendo and Sega for the Sonic franchise back in May 2013. Nintendo was originally going publish Sonic Lost World in Europe, but ended being Sega publishing the game in Europe by the end.

According to many Sonic fans, they say that most of the new Sonic games were aimed at Nintendo/Mario type fans or Kids CGI animated film fans and to do this, SEGA has managed to semi-kill off from the new Sonic titles, Shadow, Rouge and some fan-favourites (except for Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Dr. Eggman and Metal Sonic) from Sonic the Hedgehog, other than Mario and Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Games, in which Shadow, Rouge and some other similar fan favourites did appear in.

They also criticise Ken Pontac (writer for Sonic games), Warren Graff and Takashi Iizuka (the so-called head of the Sonic franchise) for having no idea on the Sonic franchise. Takashi Iizuka said in a interview with a website that the reason he wanted to make Sonic games different to what fans wanted the games to look like is due to the fact, because he thinks that “fans should need a more different Sonic game”.

The Sonic fan convention in the US, Sonic Boom had low attendance according to Sonic fan Darkminer. The Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed game’s DLCs (updates) were only available for PC users. Plus Sonic fansites have been shutting down probably fact that due to many were finding Sonic boring, according to a comment posted on a Sonic Boom TV series article on TSSZ News, and British gaming website Metro already called Sonic Lost World, one of the worst videogames, due to copycatting Super Mario Galaxy, even Takashi Iizuka noticed that. Even Sonic Wrecks turned itself from a Sonic website into a general gaming website, due to Kevin ArchAngelUK falling out of love of Sonic the Hedgehog and SEGA.